A blog exploring the intersection of economic thinking and urban planning/real estate development and related big-think themes.

Friday, November 23, 2007

Voting with feet, if not with ballots

Writing about cities and human settlement, Joel Kotkin usually gets it right. In today's WSJ, he recalls the beginnings of post-war suburbanization in the U.S.

Elite opinion had completely missed the point. Critics objected how large numbers of people were able to dramatically improve their lives on the wings of entrepreneurial discovery, in this case by the Levitt's and their followers.

Interestingly, little has changed. The pseudo-science of "sustainability planning" is invoked to stymie development, drive up prices and put housing affordability out of reach of most young people. Not to worry, their housing will be provided by new politicized housing initiatives.

In 2004, most eligible voters voted for neither Bush nor Kerry. Bush was actually second and Kerry third. Rational ignorance was first.

Interestingly, a majority do vote with their feet. Most Americans have moved away from central cities where the political corruption (lower-case as well as upper-case) is worst.

Suburban DevelopmentBy JOEL KOTKIN

I didn't grow up in Levittown, N.Y., the iconic Americansuburb founded 60 years ago. But you could call North Woodmere, the Long Islandtown my parents moved to in 1957, a close relation.In 1963, poet Richard Wilbur wrote "To an American Poet JustDead": "In summer sunk and stupefied/ The suburbs deepen in their sleep ofdeath." Many of us who were raised in these places would have agreed. Some mighteven have cheered the news announced a couple of weeks ago that the Levitt Co.has gone bankrupt.

The streets of our suburbs were often roughly paved at first;trees were slim sticks that provided little shade. Everyone was similarly agedand, for the most part, from one of the three major New York social food groups:Italians, Irish and Jews. Boredom could be relieved only by a train ride toManhattan. In our innocence, we did not know why our parents moved to thesepre-packaged wonderlands. The only times we got an inkling was when visitingrelatives still back in Brooklyn. They lived in apartments on blocks with noyards and often attended dangerous schools.

Our parents, as we understood only when we got older, knewwhat they were doing. They were part of a nationwide revolution in expectationsamong middle- and working-class city dwellers for whom a move to suburbia meantthe chance to flee the crime, crowding and other ills of urbanAmerica.

What made this revolution possible was in large part what madecars, refrigerators and TV sets luxury goods no longer: mass production. Likemost geniuses, William Levitt, the founder of Levittown, worked on a simplepremise. If you could build houses on an assembly line and remove cost-creatingencumbrances (most famously, basements), you could make them affordable foraverage Americans. "Any damn fool can build homes," Mr. Levitt, who made thecover of Time in 1950, once noted. "What counts is how many you can sell for howlittle."

Previously, homeownership had been a prospect for only theaffluent or people in the hinterlands. But Mr. Levitt, using productiontechniques he perfected in the Navy, offered amazingly cheap homes: The firstCape Cods went for $6,990 in 1947 (when median family income was $3,031). Withthe aid of mortgage financing from the GI Bill, buyers could get along with downpayments as low as $100 and monthly installments of as little as$65.

By the time he was finished, 17,500 homes were completed inLevittown. This was not a singular achievement but one repeated by Mr. Levitthimself in Philadelphia's suburbs and by imitators from coast to coast. Indeed,by the mid-1980s America enjoyed a rate of homeownership -- roughly two-thirdsof all families -- double that of Germany, Switzerland, France and Britain.Nearly three-quarters of AFL-CIO members and the vast majority of intactfamilies owned their own homes.